Virtual window-shopping

Firsts Online: It's just like you're (not) really there

Modi Leta 1936, for sale via AntikBar (£150)

While I was “reporting” from last week’s Cambridge book fair, on Monday, the poet and biographer Nicholas Murray was making a crucial point about secondhand bookshops, and about what matters about that “grotty old bookshop” just off your high street, probably “closed unpredictably when you arrive or watched over by a grumpy owner whose prices are in many cases a damned cheek”:

Apart from the obvious fact that you can never know until you get it in your hand what the condition of an online purchase is like, the tactile pleasures of book handling (I genuflect in passing to Myles na Gopaleen), the physical feel and even smell of a book (yes, yes, I am obsessive) are all part of the decision finally to go for it. Yet until you take the wrapper off the package from the courier you don’t really know what you are going to get.

But there is a great deal more to book-bibbing than this. The pleasure of the chase is one thing but even greater is the discovery while browsing of the book you didn’t know you were looking for. In the universe of algorithms, online conformity, “influencing”, ticking the necessary boxes, jumping to attention when the red asterisk glares a warning at you that some “required field” has not been filled in, it is a pleasure to break loose, to become a free agent who is not being controlled by the digital police. That means going into a shop and, outrageously, just seeing what comes up. Just as digital maps on your phone don’t want you to spread out the map and ponder and play with possibilities but to go to a specific place from the place you are at (and they already know where you are) on the route that they propose in the number of minutes they calculate, so online shopping takes the unpredictability out of things.

Along with probably anyone else who has ever bought a book online, I have learnt to appreciate the difference between “you don’t really really know what you are going to get” and – via Any Amount of Books or Skoob Books or wherever – “the book you didn’t know you were looking for”. The former kind of purchase can be galling, but maybe it’s best to put it down to experience and – not make one via any virtual marketplace that doesn’t insist on high standards of description. That permits stock images of book covers, for example, and misleading publication details.

Although it concentrates, for obvious economic reasons, on wares that make the whole exercise worthwhile for rare book dealers, Firsts Online is more like what I imagine the online standard of presentation should be. A virtual book fair established in 2020, for the obvious reason of that moment in time, it now continues in tandem with Firsts, the London fair that runs at the Saatchi Gallery in May. Firsts Online opened yesterday and runs until March 3. Catch it while you can, then, at least for browsing purposes . . . Here are a few of the highlights that caught my eye as I strolled among the virtual booksellers’ stands; but there are ninety-nine exhibitors in total, and this is more a dip than a delve. I gravely tip my hat to Camden Lock Books, Jonathan Frost Rare Books, Karol Krysik et al, and apologise for glancing at my watch, backing out of the virtual room, running for the bus etc.

2 Harrison-Hiett Rare Books

Noël Coward as seen by Max Beerbohm, from Heroes and Heroines of Bittersweet Fame (London: Leadlay, 1931; £150). Bittersweet fame has, I fear, left behind most of the other subjects in this vellum-encased portfolio of Beerbohm caricatures. Noted as I drift away from this stand: the attractive copy of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel (London: Faber, 1965; £475), bought by an eighteen year old, David S. Miall, who later went on to become an English professor at the University of Alberta.

20 Oak Knoll Books

The Birthday (self-published, 1990; $2,150) is a story by Emily Whittle – but it is also a striking piece of binding work by Monique Lallier, a fan that comes in a clamshell box, of which there are only six “copies”. This seems a worthy piece of book art to sit on Oak Knoll’s stand alongside Francescan Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1499; $250,000), that most sumptuous of Renaissance books, as discussed in Bibliomania not so long ago. But there is too much of interest here. I start to feel delirious and have to move away . . .

39 Swan’s Fine Books

This edition of Sense and Sensibility (San Francisco: Arion Press, 2017; £560) was published to mark the bicentenary of Jane Austen’s death. It features ten collages by the American artist Augusta Talbot, and limited to 300 copies, signed by Talbot, and its octavo format reflects the conventions of the novelistic format in Austen’s time. It bears up well next to the Alice in Wonderland (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1930; £1,185) illustrated by Marie Laurencin, another splendid response from an artist to a writer, published in limited edition form.

48 Phillip J. Pirages Fine Books & Manuscripts

Come for The Worlds of Kafka & Cuevas: An unsettling flight to the fantasy world of Franz Kafka by the Mexican artist, José Luis Cuevas (Philadelphia: Falcon Press, 1959; £200). Stay for The Library of Miss Currer, at Eshton-Hall (London: Robert Triphook, 1820; £4,350). I’m serious about the latter: only forty copies of this catalogue were printed, and our old friend Thomas “Bibliomania” Dibdin reckoned that Frances Mary Richardson Currer (1785–1861) was “the head of all female collectors in Europe”. She is the Currer from whom Charlotte Brontë took her celebrated pseudonym, and owned something like 15,000 to 20,000 volumes, covering everything from early printed books to natural science. And yes, I’m hoping to come back to her some time.

67 P. & B. Rowan

T. Sturge Moore, Danaë (London: [Vale Press], 1903; £350) is one of the last productions of the Vale Press, that much-revered outfit, most closely associated with the artist Charles Ricketts. The poetry it contains is less interesting, I fear, than the container itself. The eye flits to an alarming title nearby, Bombs: The philosophy and poetry of anarchy (Philadelphia: A. R. Saylor, 1894; £350). This turns out to be a miscellany of verse and prose pieces on subjects such as monogamy, money and the Mormons by a certain William A. Whittick. Truth bombs, perhaps. At least to the book’s author.

97 Bibliopathos

Jack and his third wife Stella Kerouac moved to Saint Petersburg, Florida, in 1966; the writer needs somewhere to put his royalties, of course. Hence the Kerouacs’ bank identity card (Citizens National Bank, 1955; £2,800), which has somehow survived to become a relic of their last few years together. (Jack Kerouac died in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.) More substantial a relic in every respect is the Bibliopathos copy of Bernard of Clairvaux’s Opuscula (Brixia: Angelo and Jacopo Britannico, 1495; £5,800): although pocked-sized, this collection of the twelfth-century mystic’s writings eventually came into the possession of Robert d’Orleans (1840–1910), who saw action in both the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War.